6 EASY STEPS TO MAKE SOCIAL ADVERTISING YOUR AWESOME SECRET WEAPON
Free And Paid Social Advertising
There was a time when advertising your business was only done in print. Then free social media advertising came along initially adopted by big organisations. Smaller businesses soon followed suit and suddenly everyone wanted a go at social advertising.
And yes, it’s been a great success since Facebook, and Twitter got on-board the paid social advertising train where everyone wants to now be a passenger. Thing is, do you understand it enough to take advantage of it?
Generating Leads
1) Twitter And Generating Leads
Using Twitter to generate leads is a great way of advertising. Twitter isn’t just about getting retweets, replies and increasing followers, it's also a great lead generator and audience/customer support platform too.
2) Spend Enough Time On Twitter Each Day
The important thing is to make sure you allocate enough time each day to Twitter so you can focus on your marketing strategy. Always treat your lead generating tweets differently, they should be clear, short and to the point, supply just the one link but don’t use endless hashtags and mentions - Keep it simple.
3) Use Paid And Organic Tweets At The Same Time
Your lead generation tweets for your advertising campaigns don’t need to be boring and remember to make sure any images you use aren’t too close to the lead generation link. It’s also important not to ignore organic tweets. Use both paid and organic tweets in your feed. They should both work together.
Measure the performance of each tweet and don’t go too fast too soon, you don’t want to be spending too much money at the beginning, just take it slow and watch it build. Any leads you identify, make sure you follow them up. The instructions on Twitter’s business page are easy to follow, so you don’t need to be a tech savvy genius to work it out, it won’t bring you overnight success, but it will pay off in the long-term.
4) Facebook Advertising
Facebook has a massive following and despite Twitter’s popularity, Facebook is still the lead in terms of numbers. Some prefer Twitter, others are more accustomed to Facebook. Having used it on a personal basis it’s the oldest and most familiar social media platform out there, after all who doesn’t have a Facebook account? For that reason, the familiarity it brings may make it seem easier and more comfortable to work with.
There are several solutions which can help you engage with your audience on FB, but not all businesses are aware of them, and which ones work best. As with Twitter, paid social advertising can work in tandem with unpaid organic, so you’re constantly working it.
To begin with, you can start simply by creating a Facebook Business Page where you can create your brand and engage with your audience.
You’ll be asked to create a category, and there are 6 choices ranging from local business or places, companies, organisations or institutions, brands or products, artists, bands or public figures and entertainment. You can pay to promote your business page or you can skip for now and just advertise unpaid.
5) Ads Creator or Power Editor
To advertise on FB, you have the option to use Facebook ads creator or the Power Editor. If you’re new, then the advert creator may be more to your liking. It’s simple to use and it should get your first campaign off to a flying start. You can always move on to the Power Editor once you feel confident enough to do so.
6) Horses For Courses, Using FB To Advertise And Target The Right Audience
FB adverts are not all equal in power, some are great for encouraging ‘likes’ while others will get your fans to engage on a more personal level.
There are others which will encourage your audience to click on a post which will then send them on to your website. There are different campaign objectives: page likes, page post engagement, clicks to websites, website conversions, app Installs, app engagement, event responses, and offer claims. You choose your campaign objective in the Ads Creator.
7) FB Campaign Budget
Next is to choose your campaign budget and this is very like what you’d do with Twitter, this helps you to control your spend so it doesn’t get out of control, and the advice here would be to not over spend at this point, but go into it gently.
Choosing your FB Audience is crucial in making sure you market to a relevant audience, otherwise your marketing in pointless. It will give you a choice of locations, age, interests, gender etc. This means you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly who to target.
There is so much more to FB advertising, but this would be an extremely long post if we continued, so it’s up to you to have to look and play around with it until you feel confident enough to go ahead with a paid advertisement. But, what about other social network platforms?
8) Instagram Advertising
Instagram now offers paid social advertising as well as FB and Twitter. Its focus is on images with well-chosen taglines and hashtags, in a similar way to Twitter. Instagram ads are accessed and bought through a Facebook interface via the Ads Manager and Power Editor we mentioned earlier.
9) Other Paid Advertising Channels
Two other social media platforms which need no introduction are Pinterest which is seen as Instagram's closest competitor, and LinkedIn, the world's largest business orientated social network. Both platforms offer various paid advertising options which may be worth exploring too.
It's advisable to get your LinkedIn company page filled out fully and have a decent amount of content posted on the channel before you do any advertising to get the best results.
Don’t get left behind – use paid advertising on social networking platforms to great effect We are seeing businesses get great results by marketing in this way. Using Twitter, FB and Instagram to increase leads, website sales and engagement you can connect with your audience, and like-minded people who are interested in your brand. It’s a worthwhile investment and something that will be around for a long, long time.
Shane McEvoy is a seasoned SEO and inbound marketing expert with nearly 30 years of experience in advertising. He established Flycast Media, a specialist B2B digital agency, and is a published author of two well-received guides while contributing to several industry publications - read his complete profile here.
